Summary:

In this collection of poems, the author details her descent into the hell of bipolar disorder and the re-integration of her life, thanks to lithium therapy. In "Other Lives" she describes herself as "mother of none, good friend to all, / who for no apparent reason, / tries to kill herself, twice." She writes angrily to the psychiatrist who misdiagnosed her and prescribed the wrong medication: "Your first mistake was to see me at all. / Your second, prescribing the Elavil." (in "Shocking Treatment") While she misses the productivity and "rush" of her hypomanic episodes, she realizes this is the price she has to pay to avoid another "two years of pain or nothing, numbness."

As the author's health improves, she cares for friends who are dying of AIDS and for the dying father of a friend: "I'm learning, as I nurse / my father that the worst / would be protection from / death's reality." (in "For Jean") The collection is interlaced with a series of poems called "Black Stones" in which the author encounters very directly the reality of death. In the last of these, she cries out the words of her friend Matthew who has just died: "Rika, dear friend, live and live and live!"

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Summary:

The poem depicts a fiercely wild and free woman who meets an untimely death in a motorcycle accident. The anatomy student views the cadaver as more than just "thirty-one-year-old female flesh," and fantasizes about what her life (and death) must have been like.

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Summary:

As you are now, so once was I; Prepare for death and follow me. The novel's advisory epigram prepares readers for the realities of aging and death which affect both narrator and reader. Following surgery, Caro Spencer is delivered to Twin Elms, a nursing home in a rural New England setting. While this intelligent woman requires only short-term care, she is deposited, permanently, in an understaffed, sub-standard care facility by relatives unwilling to add her minor but time-consuming difficulties to their own.

It is not a pretty setting. The staff is overworked and demeaning, especially to the new resident who is well-educated and accustomed to better circumstances. The nursing home routine is careless of individual differences and needs, and set up to strip away autonomy and dignity through petty and cruel indignations.

Caro is able to survive by keeping a secret diary for observations, reflections, and interpretations; ultimately, this alone sustains her. While the voice is that of an elderly woman (as we are now), the journal is for us, those still able to manage their lives, but unable to predict or control end-of-life events.

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Summary:

A former ape presents his report to a meeting of the scientific Academy. Less than five years ago, he was captured in the jungles of West Africa. While on the ship returning to Europe, the ape came to the realization that there was no way out: "I was pinned down." Even if he should escape from his cage, he knew there would be no way to go home.

However, the ape developed a profound inward calm, thanks in part to the kindness of the ship's crew. His close observation of the crew and other humans allowed him to imitate them. In general, they were easy to imitate, although some of the viler human habits like drinking schnapps were more difficult to get used to. Finally, he realized that the only way to stay out of the zoo was to become human enough to perform as an ape-turned-human on the vaudeville stage. That's what he did.

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Summary:

In this story, Earth's inhabitants have moved below terra firma where their every need is met and every act controlled by "the machine." A young rebel protesting against the loss of authenticity and the reverence for abstraction seeks to communicate with his mother about his need to go to the surface of the earth. This act of direct experience terrifies his mother who is sure that her son will be sentenced to "homelessness." The son does experience the beauty of the earth and returns to prophesize the end of the machine and the "civilization" it created.

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Summary:

The title of this volume is taken from William Carlos Williams's Patterson, where the spray over the falls on the Patterson River "brings in the rumors of separate worlds." In the Introduction Coles evokes his friendship with Williams and Williams's vision as the stimulus for this poetry.

The first section consists of poems evoking incidents and people from the author's childhood. The second section includes a number of militant poems from Coles's 1960's work with black children in the South, and later poems dealing with Nicaragua and Northern Ireland. The final section, entitled "On the Day Jesus Christ Was Born," is a set of Christmas poems evoking various times and places in the poet's life.

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Summary:

Opening during the early days of World War II, this haunting story of love, war, families and nations, good and evil covers 60 plus years in the life of a young Greek woman on the island of Cephallonia. The narrative traces the disruption of the peace of the old village by Italian occupation, German cleansing, and Communist infiltration in developing a history, while revolving around the personal life stories of the island physician, his daughter and her deep and romantic love for an enemy soldier, and the cowardice and bravery of people caught up in the horrors of war.

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